Even if she said intolerably stupid things, I still always liked Ann Coulter. While I rarely agreed with her, I found myself continuing to follow her exploits through the years; I even read a few of her books (how I miss ample free time). Most of her media manifestations follow a predictable pattern where Ann says something outlandish followed by the host acting flabbergasted by her words and only responding with the most base, amateurish retort. Her recent appearance on The View, a television program not known for its highbrow philosophical dialogue, is just another in a long line of media facades ensured to garner simpleminded condemnation or celebration.

While she is still a household name in political circles, Coulter’s media ubiquity has taken a stumble in the last few years. Perhaps it has to do with newer and more bombastic characters on the right replacing her as a go-to conservative firebrand, but she has also increasingly angered mainstream conservatives in the establishment. Her most recent book, Adios Amigos!, focuses entirely on immigration and why Ann wants to see it halted. While her previous books slandered liberals as traitors and fools, they provided enough political red meat to placate various circles in the conservative movement. The narrative she builds around immigration is not one beltway Republicans are interested in discussing, especially as they try to move their party towards a moderate position on the subject. When the Republican primary first launched, the leading candidates (Bush, Walker, and Rubio) all had “moderate” positions on immigration, giving strategists hope that their party could mount a campaign capable of harvesting migrant votes.

Then in walked Donald Trump. He wasn’t content to say immigration was bad for America or the economy, but framed it as a plot by criminal groups and governments to infiltrate America and undermine its institutions and society. When Trump said he wanted to “make America great again,” it wasn’t hard to decipher which group of people he felt made the nation weaker to begin with.

While Trump reminds us ad nauseam of his superior intellect, I would wager he has not thought long and hard about his current crop of positions. Anti-immigration rhetoric is nothing new on the right; a slew of prominent sites like American Renaissance and VDare have spent the last few decades beating this very drum. But these sites have a limited appeal beyond their immediate base of readers, and I doubt Trump would have spent late nights poring through articles disparaging immigration and migrants. These ideas needed a simplified, media-savvy repackaging Trump could proclaim and refashion for use in a political campaign. Trump unquestionably knew Ann Coulter, and her new book was just the kind of text Trump could use as the philosophical core of his campaign.

This theory is more than simple conjecture. Coulter recently opened for Trump at an event in Iowa, asserting themes about Mexicans that even the Donald wouldn’t mention.

“Donald Trump read it,” Coulter said during the videotaped interview, held in a small side room where this reporter happened to walk in and film without objection at the Politicon conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. “So you’re gonna understand everything that’s happening over the next year if you read it. It’s where he got that spicy stuff on Mexican rapists.”

Obviously, most pundits claim their work influences figures of power, but corroborating statements made by Trump appear to confirm Coulter’s assertion. A few months back, Trump argued:

“The Mexican government forces many bad people into our country because they’re smart,” he told interviewer Katy Tur. “They’re smarter than our leaders, and their negotiators are far better than what we have, to a degree that you wouldn’t believe. They’re forcing people into our country. … And they are drug dealers and they are criminals of all kinds. We are taking Mexico’s problems.”

In Coulter’s recent book, she stated:

“Sending undesirable immigrants to an enemy nation is a war tactic, such as, in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter idiotically offered to take any Cubans who wanted to come to America and Fidel Castro responded by emptying Cuba’s prisons and mental institutions onto the Mariel boatlift. Today, immigration is again being used as a war technique by America’s enemies: Democrats. Instead of Communist dictators conniving to send their headaches to the United States, American liberals are conniving to bring them here– and then hand them voter registration cards. Third World immigration is a win-win for the Left. They can instruct immigrants on hating the country and get their housework done at the same time!” [Adios, America, pgs. 21-22, 2015]

As my college professors used to say, there is a lot to unpack here, but a rhetorical link is clear. Both positions pronounce a litany of conspiracies behind America’s immigration policy, but they share the inkling that nations, political parties, and specific ethnic groups use immigration as a political tactic against the American state.

Roland Dodds is an educator, researcher and father just north of San Francisco who writes about politics, culture and education. He spent his formative years in radical left wing politics, but now prefers the company of contrarians of all political stripes (assuming they aren't teetotalers). He is a regular contributor at Harry's Place and Ordinary Times.

Middle-American Radicals were/are generally white, not college educated, fiercely nationalistic, and with an income that fell in the lower-middle to middle-class range. Not Archie Bunker but close enough. Jobs were either semi-skilled blue-collar (HVAC type of stuff), sales (which is or was a good way for non-college educated people to earn decent money provided they got great commissions), or clerical work.

This group of people tends to see themselves as under siege from below (unions and minorities and immigrants) and above (corporations and upper-middle class liberals with their visions). MARS voters liked certain aspects of the New Deal and Great Society like Medicare, Social Security, and Price Controls but they were also the group that most fiercely hated The Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action.

Interesting. I think there is some truth here, and it would make sense why Trump actually has support beyond strictly Republican circles. I am not entirely sure the about the description of what a middle-American radical looks like as noted above, but there does seem to be links between said groups and Trump.

This also explains why anti-immigrant parties are doing well in Europe at the moment. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Middle American Radicals and the Europeans voting for EDL or the Front National have similar characteristics to the Middle American Radicals.

In the United States, you can trace back to the Middle American Radical tradition to the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings blamed Irish and German immigrants for stealing jobs and decreasing wages. They were patriotic and blamed immigrants for introducing alien and un-American ideas and institutions like the Roman Catholic Church, labor unions, and the saloon that served beer on Sunday to the United States. At the same time, the Know-Nothings tended to support the more activist politics of the Whigs when it came to government intervention in the economy like protective tariffs than the laissez-faire politics of the Democratic Party. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

An interesting thing about the vile #cuckservative movement is that they seem kind of dense. A lot of them tweet about how Trump won’t bend over backwards for Israel but Trump’s position on Israel is ardent support.

Agreed on the #cuckservative types. I think they simply want to like a politician so much, they are willing to overlook just about everything he says. Having said that, I think they agree with his two major points (immigration and Iraq), and thus give him a pass on everything else.

I listened to a podcast recently by #cuckservative hashtag folks, and they loved Trump’s tax plan. They talked about it as some great support for working and middle class individuals and a radical departure from mainstream Republican plans. When I actually looked at the plan, I had a hard time seeing how they got to that conclusion. Willful ignorance?

“On September 4, 1962, hundreds of conservative activists crowded into the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles for a protest meeting that they called the California T Party. These protestors were unusually well-heeled and unusually radical. They were there to support a constitutional amendment that would outlaw all federal taxation of income and inherited wealth, and would further require the federal government to sell off virtually all its assets in order to pay for a massive, one-time transfer of wealth to the richest Americans.”

Hell, China has historically done this, and is currently doing this. Moving Han Chinese to the outer provinces like Tibet and the provinces near Mongolia. It’s being done because, frankly, it works. It’s one reason why there has been some violence in those areas. The locals are pushing back.

Just drawing the distinction that Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California were all part of Mexico at one time. And saying that now, it makes me think of how differently race relations developed in those states. Mexico actively solicited American settlers in Texas, which led to a large number of whites, many of whom were slave-owners; where Mexico had already freed its slaves in 1812 after winning independence from Spain. This led directly to the Texas War of Independence. Western New Mexico was settled by the Spanish along the Camino Real running from Santa Fe through El Paso and on to Mexico City. Whites are currently about 38% of the population, and I don’t think they have ever been a majority in the state. The Eastern side of the state was Apache territory until the Republic of Texas tried to claim it, and the U.S. Cavalry was sent in to secure the territory. White ranchers were the first real settlers to come in, first with the Chisholm Trail in the Seven Rivers Hills area, and later the oil men. From seeing the pictures of the law enforcement officers from a neighboring town back in 1945, they typically wore a Stetson with a long-barreled revolver hanging off heir sides, tin star pinned to the chest. There were still Wild West-style gunfights in the streets in those days, and they brought in some real gunslingers to bring the rowdies under control. Arizona history is something I know little about. It used to be the place where New Mexico banished its criminals. Something changed somewhere along the line, and I’m not sure where. Monterrey was the capital of California under Mexico. Most of the racial tension from the 1800’s I hear about is concerning the Chinese, whereas most of it I hear about in the 1900’s was directed against a Mexican underclass.

And then there’s that Republic of Sonora thing.

I have known many families who have relations on both sides of the border. It’s been like that for a long time.

There is likely some sad truth in that. I don’t want to play amateur psychologist, but this might also explain her interest in supporting candidates like Trump who stick it to mainstream Republicans and their media allies.

Or maybe she is just tired of the same old rehearsed talking points from folks like Jeb and Rubio, and is looking for something a bit more exciting?

There is a not inconsiderable number of people who conflate “skinny” with “hot” (especially when blonde). Since she lacks any disfiguring features, was skinny and blonde, she was therefore hot.

Randomly: Anyone else notice that the ‘Chick in Danger Of the Week/Chick Dean Wanted to Bone’ on Supernatural was generally brunette? It’s been ages since I watched the show, but I recall realizing the show was quite brunette heavy.

Ah, then again my first crush as a child was Lisa Hayes….(I never could get Rick’s fascination with Minmei. I mean sure, pop star. But there’s a smart brunette first officer there! Right there? Ditch the stupid whiny singer! Go for the smart brunette!)

Minmei was a brunette to if you count black and brown hair as being in the same family. Rick was young and dumb so it would make sense that he would go for the sensual pop singer rather than the smart, career woman.

I agree that both Trump and Coulter are deep in conspiracy theory land in their views on immigration, but I think there’s a big difference between the two. Trump’s theory is that Mexico is somehow intentionally compelling its worst citizens to emigrate to the US to relieve the burden those types impose on Mexican society. Which is an odd enough view on a bunch of levels, but notably fails to include the US as an active participant in that process.

Coulter, on the other hand, proposes pretty much the exact opposite: that other nations aren’t conniving to send their worst and evilest here, but rather that the “enemy within” – liberals! – are actively recruiting those folks and trying to bring them in to increase Dem voter turnout.

The problem with each theory is also noteworthy. First, there’s no evidence that Mexican or latino immigrants are the worst members of their society. But more specifically, Trump’s fails because it’s sorta impossible to imagine that Mexico has a level of competence to actually engage in this type of behavior. The drug cartels might be able to pull it off, but not the gummint. And the problem with Coulter’s view is that insofar as the US embraces a tacit policy of allowing illegals to remain once they get here (a view embraced more clearly by Bush than Obama, interestingly) it’s because US businesses really want that cheap labor potential, a policy which GOPers clearly wink and nod about when confronted with. So she sorta reverses the actual logic in play by suggesting that those folks only end up here because the enemy within (liberals…) are actively recruiting evildoers.

I think you are generally correct, but it may have more to do with Trump just avoiding the demonization of American businesses he knows are very much complicate in mass migration to America. He picked Ann’s lowest hanging fruit (Mexicans are up to no good) and ran with it without touching on more of the complexities in her argument.

As for Trump fans, I am sure most of them know big business is in bed with proponents of mass migration, but are fine having all the blame placed on the immigrants themselves for the current predicament.

I have to say, though, listening to talk radio this is a tide that appears to be turning. More and more, you’re hearing hosts and callers demonizing businesses for illegal immigration — especially those that fall on the Trump side of the equation.

They’re also (the callers far more than the hosts, but still) beginning to sound downright left wing in their calls for the rich 1%ers to be taken to task so that those on the bottom rungs can have it better.

Its been making me wonder… If Trump actually gets the nod, could we see a a race where the GOP candidate runs a campaign on demonizing the rich, monied business interests, and the Dem candidate on maintaining the economic status quo? That would be fascinating.

Good observations. What has interested me about the alt-right as of late is this rather radical, almost left-wing economic criticism of America. These points echo many of the anecdotes you mentioned from talk radio.

The Republican Party is the party of big business, but they always found a way to win over portions of the white working class with social issues and platitudes related to immigration. Now that those social issues (gay marriage and the like) are becoming mute points, and Republicans have been unable/unwilling to do anything about mass migration, many of those white voters are starting to turn against the party’s leaders.

I for one am glad to see it. Trump and his ideas may be dangerous, but I prefer his brand of populism to anything Jeb Bush or Scott Walker are selling.

It also jives with my belief that although the GOP likes to think of itself and the more conservative party and the Dems like to think of themselves as the progressive party of change, more and more the Dems are really the small-c conservatives fighting for status quo, and the GOP is becoming more and more the radical voice in mainstream American politics.

They are becoming radical in different ways though. The Walker faction wants to severely curtail the Unions and is very corporate friendly but this does not play to the Trump crowd largely. They might like Walker on other socially conservative issues though.

I think this all goes to Lee’s observations that European conservatives made peace with the social changes of the 1960s but American conservatives have not and are still trying to fight against all the changes that happened during the 1960s and 70s.

Also radical doesn’t necessarily mean left-wing. I see radical as just wanting drastic change regardless of the direction.

Well, they’re still fighting against the New Deal and that’s been in place 80 years now.

I don’t know what to call that BUT radical. It’s change to the status quo Americans have had for like four generations now. There are very few Americans alive who drew breath before the New Deal was enacted. It’s literally the way things have been for pretty much everyone’s entire life.

Maybe, in the end, change is necessary to it. But you don’t get to call it ‘conservative’ — unless we’re just ditching what words mean entirely.

We can call it reactionary rather than radical or conservative. Many Republicans seem to want to go back to an imagined past of what life was like before the New Deal, Great Society, Civil Rights, and Sexual Revolution. To them it was a time when business people with a plan could do what they want without running afoul of civil servants regulating the economy, where teens were innocent rather than experimenting with sex, and the varieties of “those people” knew their place.

Eh, it’s all of the same piece anyways. Like people longing for Switzerland’s gun laws — without realizing what that whole package contains! Or longing for the 1950s, without thinking about racism, the tax rates, etc….

It’s basically just an urge for the world to be a certain way, without any understanding or care for the actual details of that time and place.

Reminds me of certain top-level managers — they have a ‘vision’ and ignore the petty realities that get in the way. (“No, we can’t make software to do that. That’s a NP complete problem. We literally cannot, before the heat death of the universe, make it solve that. If you want to approximate a solution — say something that’s probably in the top 5% or so — we can do that. For a lot of money.”).

I’ve had that conversation.. I had to tell a guy that what he wanted was, in fact, mathematically possible but would take a very, very, very long time to do. He finally accepted a quick and dirty approximation that gave ‘good enough’ solution, but was angry about it even a year later with it working just fine for his engineers. He simply refused to believe that “reality” was the problem, not our skills as programmers.

If Trump actually gets the nod, could we see a a race where the GOP candidate runs a campaign on demonizing the rich, monied business interests, and the Dem candidate on maintaining the economic status quo?

If Hillary wins, the Dems will certainly be doing the best they can to uphold their end of that bargain.

Frankly, I don’t see the conservative base as being hostile to the 1% (not yet anyway). What I see them being hostile to is a set of policy-compromises which hurt/don’t help them while helping the capital owners.

My own view of the conservative base’s newfound Close The Border Imperative (which is overdetermined, no doubt, I admit and concede) originates from recognizing that illegals are driving down wages/income-potentials in increasingly more sectors of the economy, and the way to stop that downward trend is to stop the inflow of illegals.

Some of this has to do with the politics of capital and labor flows in a capitalist economy, as well. From a political point of view, capital flight mostly punished unions – cuz labor intensive businesses had the most to gain by moving capital centers to cheaper labor sources – which are historically bastions of D voters. The influx of labor, tho, cuts wages across the political board, and favors capital owners more than wage earning laborers. And I think conservatives have come to realize that.

Interesting. I’ve tried to tease out why I’m worried about that matchup myself, so we’re probably seeing a bit of the same conventional-logic-mobius-strip-flip in play there. Right now, I have no robust intuitions about how it would actually play out, tho, since Trump hasn’t really established his own baseline yet. But I think it’s an interesting possibility.

Since you ask. Its a hunch that comes from my experience as an Enterprise Sales Rep over the past 20-years. In short; I have 100 ways to position and beat all of my usual competitors. But every once in a while you find yourself competing against someone that isn’t in your space. Those are the deals you often lose.

When the buyer brings someone to the table that “doesn’t belong” the rookie mistake is to tell the buyer they are doing it wrong (and sometimes they are); but, in my experience, the buyer often knows why they are doing this and its usually because the “non-competitor” has brought something new to the table – and often this is the early signal of disrupting change to your business.

Well I am half Canadian so it’d be pretty easy. I probably wouldn’t bother, I’m within a couple hours drive of the border so I could escape quickly should the anti-Canadia pogroms begin.

I will grant that should his Trumpness win the GOP’s nod then a lot of my assumptions and understandings of the GOP electorate are flawed. That said I find it difficult to imagine that Trump having won a bitter raucous caucus with a GOP presumably rattling at the seams could take on Hillary with her entire party united behind her and with both Women(doubly) and Latinos motivated to support her… and win.

And now let me say something astonishing and true. If a GOP nominee had to win the nomination I’d like it to be Trump with Kasich as a distant #2. Why? Trump might actually refuse to rubber stamp everything the GOP senate and Congress would send him whereas there’d be slim hope of that from any of the rest of that posse.

Yes, I understand. I think Trump has like an infinitesimally small change of getting the GOP nod. If he gets the nod I’d assume he’d have an equally bad chance of defeating a united Democratic party to claim the presidency. So his chances of being president, in my mind, are really really small.

But your core point, that if the table is upended enough to nominate Trump then all bets are off, is a sound one. It is, however, also considerably more possible in my mind that the zeitgeist that nominates Trump might not extend to the general electorate or to the Democrats and Trump would merely lead the GOP to a historic shellacking.

Tod Kelly: DoddsThey’re also (the callers far more than the hosts, but still) beginning to sound downright left wing in their calls for the rich 1%ers to be taken to task so that those on the bottom rungs can have it better.

Emphasis should be on the word ‘sound,’ though, since there’s thus far approximately zero policy meat on that populist bone.

Trump fans … are fine having all the blame placed on the immigrants themselves for the current predicament.

I think I disagree with this conclusion. I don’t think Trump, or his supporters, are blaming immigrants for the current predicament (by which I take it you mean lots of illegals roaming the American wilds). I think Trump accords blame to policy enforcement (which includes, but is not limited to, Democrats) and his supporters moreorless explicitly blame Democrats. The purpose of demonizing Mexican illegals isn’t to blame their moral deficiencies for why we’re where we are right now, I don’t think. It’s to heighten the sense of urgency to close our borders.

And really, if Trump blames anyone, as a first cause, for the current state of affairs regarding illegal immigration into the US, he blames Mexico, cuz that gummint has been rounding em up and sending em here. That’s why he’s gonna make THEM pay for the wall!!

{{Which is another distinction between his and Counter’s conspiracy theories regarding immigration. On her account, liberals are the first-cause of the problem cuz they (we, I’m a liberal!) are rounding em up and bringing them here.}}

I see your point, but I think his followers still blame immigrants first, even if they rail against government and liberals publicly. I say this because if you really placed blame for mass migration on government/big business, you wouldn’t need to spend half your time belittling the worker who is simply a pawn in policy. The fact that slurs against incoming workers takes center stage with many nativists tells you a lot about their political focus.

I am critical of mass migration and the effects it has on communities, but I find it terrible to paint the working man forced to leave their homeland in search of work/safety as the enemy. But for the grace of God go I. The companies that use those individuals to push down wages, break unions and bonds of community without care for its social effects…I put the blame for the state of mass migration and our immigration policy at their feet.

How does mass immigration break the bonds of the community? Most immigrants tend to settle in big cities or at least near big cities rather than small towns. These are places with hundreds of thousands or millions of people and not much in the way of close-knit community relations. Since many immigrants settle near other immigrants from their country, they are actually creating bonds of community.

Besides the building trades, most immigrants don’t go into fields that were ever unionized. The restaurant trade, the hotel worker trade, and other immigrant heavy fields are not known for having a unionized work force at any point.

How does mass immigration break the bonds of the community? Most immigrants tend to settle in big cities or at least near big cities rather than small towns. These are places with hundreds of thousands or millions of people and not much in the way of close-knit community relations.

This tells me you know nothing about working class communities in major metropolitan areas, most of the people in these places have lived in the same community for generations and adults are still close with their high school classmates. In my high school class it was not at all uncommon for the teachers to have taught my classmates parents (my dad went to school the next town so I didn’t have this experience).

50 years ago meatpacking was heavily unionized and much better paid than it is today.

Mass migration and the mobility of industry coincide and undermine community bonds. I wrote a bit about this in a previous post about Scandinavian welfare states (https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2015/05/08/social-democracy-and-multiculturalism/), but if neighbors know, interact, and trust each other, they are far more likely to support an economic system where higher living standards are implemented. Once you bring in a population that is outside of the existing community, those bonds begin to break down. Said groups will no longer see themselves as one.

Industry in the West has also used its mobility against communities. They can simply move their industry to a new location if a community demands higher wages and better working conditions. The American worker then becomes a migrant laborer in his own nation, as he leaves communities where a closer bond was shared due to family relations and a longer history within said community. As labor moves to a new state, they also experience the disconnect from a truer form of community.

The success of the Scandinavian models can not be divorced from the relative homogenous and stable communities that have allowed closer social (and thus economic) bonds to develop. Mass migration undermines those principles.

In the United States, the portion of the working class that was most opposed to immigration also tended to be against socialism to. One of the complaints that the Know-Nothings had about German immigration were that we were unleashing un-American ideas like socialism and anarchism into the American landscape. There is more to developing the Nordic model than cultural homogeneity. Otherwise, South Korea and Japan would have social democracy to.

Even without immigration, your still going to have the issue of race preventing the formation of Scandinavian levels of social homogeneity. Americans pissed off at immigrants also tend to be very angry about African-Americans to. Besides the coal miners, most Southern workers were very against unionization and socialism largely because they didn’t want African-Americans to be better off.

The “The Democratic Party is trying to win the political battle by encouraging immigration” never made much sense to me. You need to be a United States citizen to vote and it takes three or five years after you get Permanent Residency to get naturalized. Many Permanent Residents delay naturalization or never go through it. The path to Permanent Residency itself can take years even for legal immigrants. For undocumented aliens, it is also possible to get Permanent Residency but the path is very longer and more involved than those for legal immigrants. Its simply such a Rube Goldberg plot that nobody should be able to take it seriously yet many do.

I usually see it paired with the idea that Democrats are encouraging ineligible people to vote and underscores their call for voter ID laws. Somehow presenting ID before casting a ballot is suppose to prevent fraudulent registrations or something.

Democratic spokesman frequently insist that their long term victory is inevitable due to immigration driven demographic change.

In reality, it’s more complicated than that, but it’s hard to deny that the Democrats have a point: for example, California’s huge number of Electoral Votes went to Republicans nine times out of ten from 1952-1988, but beginning in 1992 the Democrats have won California easily six straight times. (The conventional wisdom blames this on Proposition 187 in 1994, but the Democratic dominance in California dates to 1992, two years before.)

Likewise, numerous Democrats have predicted that it’s only a matter of time until Texas flips Democratic due to immigration and high Hispanic fertility and then the Republicans will largely be locked out of the White House forever. So far, this hasn’t come close to happening, however, due to high white solidarity in Texas: Romney beat Obama 76-24 among Texas whites in 2012.

The primary thing to keep in mind, imo, is that both Trump and Coulter are, first and foremost, opportunists. Hostility to immigration from the right wing is nothing new, but you don’t have to go nearly as far as the Taki crowd to find it. In its current iteration, it manifested itself as the failure of the Bush (2) administration to get immigration reform. This was at the time just after after the Dems took control of both houses of the Congress, and both Trump and Coulter were at a relatively (very relatively) quiescent phase of their media cycles.

Right now, Trump is feeding on the zeitgeist, and Coulter is feeding off of Trump.

Mr. Dobbs’ observation strikes me as plausible. Ann’s “Adios America” is a well-written, well-researched, persuasive polemic that came out just before Trump needed to put together a theme for his campaign. It’s theme that immigration is a way that the billionaires get rich off the native working class has been underpublicized in American public life, as Trump’s rapid rise attests.

My hunch is that Trump read Ann Coulter’s “¡Adios, America!” a few weeks before his campaign announcement and recognized that immigration skepticism had matured as a philosophy, but nobody running for president was selling it. (The central joke of Coulter’s book, one that Trump’s candidacy now makes even funnier, is that white liberals don’t realize that by amping up immigration, they are making their purported worst nightmares come true. …)

Why weren’t they?

Candidates who aren’t entertaining enough to get themselves free airtime are beholden to wealthy donors. And one of the strongest forces in the world in recent decades has also been one of the least discussed: class solidarity among billionaires.

Now, you might think that having a billion dollars would free you to indulge in a Trump-like blast of a good time telling unwelcome truths. But in reality, we largely have a highly disciplined class of the extremely rich, who gather frequently in Davos and Aspen to be informed of the latest talking points about why any resistance to them is racist.

While the rich and powerful used to gloomily plot together in secret Bilderberg confabs, the current generation finds it more effective to invite the media to their conferences on how to fight nativist bigotry (and, by the way, high wages) by flooding working-class neighborhoods with Third Worlders. Thus, billionaires and journalists have become coconspirators against the public weal. That’s a tough tag team to beat.

At the billionaire level, class clearly outweighs ethnicity in pushing billionaires toward promoting more immigration. Here’s a sample from the Forbes 400’s Top 35 of billionaires who are outspoken activists for more immigration: